Income Revealed – Getting Traffic

This entry was posted by Mr Blogging on May 3, 2014 at 10:22 am

Getting Traffic
Traffic is vital to any website. Without traffic, you
can’t make money. Just like any business, you need
customers.
I focus mostly on SEO for this method, because it is
more passive than other traffic methods. There are
many different ways to get traffic, and I will talk
about a few of those, but for the most part passive is
where it’s at.
Not that SEO is completely passive. Unfortunately you
do still have to some work to keep your SEO position.
But it is far more passive than most other traffic
methods.
SEO
SEO is a relatively straightforward process. There are
a few important tasks that must be completed, but it’s
a lot easier than most people make it out to be.
It’s true that it is incredibly difficult to rank for
extremely competitive keywords. It’s not likely that
you’re going to rank well for “books” or “mp3” anytime
soon. But my type of SEO doesn’t require you to rank well for
these types of extremely competitive phrases.
Luckily, ranking well for phrases that are so
competitive isn’t as great as you’d think. These
extremely broad keywords don’t convert very well, so
the traffic isn’t very productive.
The traffic I like to get is very productive. I don’t
want millions of hits that will eat up my bandwidth
without making me any money. I want a few thousand
highly-targeted hits that will make me a lot of money
without costing me unnecessary bandwidth.
For this reason, keyword research is the most important
element of my entire SEO system. I spend more time on
keyword research than any other element in my system
aside from the creation of the actual content.
Without the right keywords, everything else you do
could be futile. If you aren’t targeting the right
keywords, your site is likely to become just one of the
millions of websites that get little to no traffic.
But with the right keyword research, your site could
end up getting plenty of traffic. Even in highlycompetitive
markets like weight loss, you can get a phenomenal amount of traffic if you choose the right
keywords.
I’m going to show you exactly how I perform keyword
research. It’s a bit time-consuming, but it’s really
easy and I only use FREE tools to do it.
My main tool is the FREE Google keyword tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Let’s say I’m creating a site about weight loss. I
can’t just target the keyword phrase “weight loss”.
Google shows over 71 million other pages with that
exact phrase! I can’t compete with that – especially
not with a small blog.
I want to find phrases that get a decent amount of
traffic, but also don’t have a ridiculous number of
pages to compete with. I try to find phrases that have
fewer than 100,000 competing sites, occasionally more
if there is enough traffic available.
I also want phrases with significant traffic. I
usually target only phrases with more than 300 monthly
searches, and the higher the better, obviously.
With a good balance of searches to competition, you can
get traffic with relative ease. SEO is pretty simple when you have the right keywords. You only need to get
a few elements working together to rank well when
you’ve chosen good keywords.
Let’s take a look at the process for choosing keywords:
1. Use the Google keyword tool to come up with a list
of appropriate keywords. Try to get at least 50
keywords that have at least 300 monthly searches,
or as many as you can find.
2. Take each of those searches and enter them into
Google in quotes to find out how much competition
you have. The reason you need to search in quotes
is because you want exact searches. You won’t
really be competing against people who aren’t
using the exact phrase, because more than likely
they won’t rank higher than you unless they are
using the exact phrase in that exact order.
3. What you want to come up with is a list of at
least 20 keywords and phrases that have the right
balance of traffic to competition. If you cannot
find at least 20 phrases in your niche that have
more than 300 monthly searches and fewer than
100,000 competing pages, it might not be a good
market to target. These are the keywords you’re going to write your blog
posts around. Each of the keywords you find will
become the title of a blog post.
Remember how I said it was important to use an SEO
plugin on your blog? The SEO plugin will do most of
the SEO work for you. As long as you always remember
to use keywords as your post titles and fill out the
SEO section at the bottom of each post properly, most
of the on-page SEO will be taken care of.
Then all you have to do is focus on putting your
keywords into the articles at least once, and you’re
good to go as far as the SEO on the pages.
Don’t worry about getting any certain keyword density.
Don’t worry about using H1 tags, or using bold, or
putting keywords into image alt tags, or anything like
that. It’s not necessary!
What IS necessary is backlinks…
Backlinks
Backlinks are the links that point to a page on the
internet. Backlinks are vital for SEO purposes. Aside
from using appropriate keyword research and making sure to use your SEO plugin, backlinks are the most
important part of SEO.
Before we talk about how to get backlinks, I want to
discuss the importance of anchor text. Anchor text is
the actual text that is linked to a page.
For example:
<a href=”http://www.google.com”>Search Engine</a>
In that example, the anchor text would be:
Search Engines
Anchor text is crucial, because search engines assign a
lot of weight to it when ranking pages. The number of
pages pointing to a particular page using a certain
phrase as anchor text has a direct bearing on how well
it ranks for that page.
In fact, anchor text is so powerful it can actually
cause pages to rank for phrases that don’t appear
anywhere on the page at all.
Adobe.com ranks on the first page for “click here”
simply because so many people use “click here” to link
to the page when telling people where to download the
Adobe Acrobat Reader. But those words don’t appear
anywhere on the page, not even in the code. Anchor text isn’t quite as powerful as it once was.
Years ago it was pretty easy to “Google bomb” a page
and send it straight to the first page just by getting
it thousands of backlinks with the same anchor text.
These days it’s not quite so simple.
Anchor text is still weighed very heavily, but Google
has also put in a few safeguards. There seems to be
some sort of threshold that can be tripped that sets
off alarms with Google. If you have too many links
pointing to your page with the exact same anchor text,
it doesn’t appear natural and you can be penalized for
it.
For this reason, I like to vary anchor text. I will
choose three different, but similar variations. That
way it looks so much more natural.
Let’s say my page is titled “Best Weight Loss Methods”.
I will use variations like this:
• Best Weight Loss Methods – 75%
• The Ten Best Weight Loss Methods – 25%
• Top Weight Loss Methods – 25%
I want to make sure most of my backlinks still use my
main keyword phrase, but the variation helps ensure
that I’m looking pretty natural. Getting backlinks is actually relatively simple. A lot
of people assume they can’t get backlinks, because most
site owners aren’t going to just freely hand out links
to new sites.
The thing is, you can actually create your own
backlinks, and I’m going to show you how.
The first major backlinks method is called article
marketing. With article marketing, you simply write
articles and submit them to article directories.
It’s quick and easy, and every single article you
submit gives you multiple backlinks. You can submit
the same article to many different directories, so you
can get a lot of links from one article.
There are so many article directories you can submit
to. I generally only submit by hand to
www.EzineArticles.com. Then I pay an outsourcer to
submit to hundreds of other directories for me. It’s
well worth the price!
Next, I use the same article to create pages on some of
the popular web 2.0 sites. I use quite a few of these.
Many of them have a lot of Google authority, so they
can be very powerful for backlinks. Some of the sites I use are:
www.weebly.com
www.hubpages.com
www.squidoo.com
www.wetpaint.com
www.zimbio.com
www.bukisa.com
www.blinkweb.com
You can use as many or as few of these as you want.
You can create multiple pages around a single topic
with each of these. The more links you get, the
better!
And make sure you don’t get links only to your main
page. Each of your pages needs to have backlinks. I
usually send about 50% of my backlinks to my main page,
and the rest spaced out pretty evenly between the other
pages.
Later I can refresh by adding some new links to each
page, adding backlinks to the new pages, and getting
more backlinks to any pages that are struggling in the
rankings.
Blog commenting is another good way to get backlinks. You can post comments on other blogs in order to get
links to your own. You just need to make sure to find
blogs that don’t have the “nofollow” tag. This would
make the links useless as far as strictly SEO purposes.
You could still get direct traffic from them, but when
a link has a nofollow tag, the search engine spider
won’t follow it.
You can find “dofollow” blogs here:
http://www.dofollowblogs.com/
http://www.followlist.com/
http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/
Forums are another excellent source of links. Many
forums allow you to put links in your forum signature,
and most of those links aren’t nofollow links. This
makes them a very good source of backlinks.
Just be careful to follow the forum rules. There’s no
sense spending a lot of time posting just to get banned
and lose all of those links!
I have one final nasty little trick I use to literally
steal traffic straight from my competitors. It’s
pretty rude, but it’s totally legal and completely
ethical. In order to outrank my competitors, I need to have more
backlinks than they do, and better quality backlinks.
In order to outrank them, I need to be sure I have the
same backlinks they do, but MORE.
So what I do is go look to find out who is linking to
them, and I try to get links from ALL of the same
places that link to them! I can’t always find every
single backlink they have, because search engines don’t
generally show an accurate representation of a site’s
links. But I can get a pretty good list from one
search engine – Yahoo.
Yahoo lists a lot more links than Google does. I’ve
had a 5 year old site that I knew had at least 500
backlinks actually show only ONE in Google. But with
Yahoo it showed over 300!
I just search for this on Yahoo:
Link:domain.com
This tells you approximately how many pages are linking
to that domain, as well as the URLs. So you can
actually go out and STEAL their backlinks!
This can boost you ahead of them in no time if you have
backlinks elsewhere, too!